Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

On Tuesday, Dec 1, 2009 Philippe Kruchten, Bruce MacIsaac, and myself participated on two virtual panels about the future of the Unified Process (we did two to support callers from around the globe) for the Global Rational User's Group (GRUG). During the panel sessions we discussed a bit of the history of the Unified Process, some of the misconceptions people have with it, some of the common mistakes people made implementing it (instantiating it to be documentation heavy and/or serial) due to those misconceptions, how it can be very agile if you choose to instantiate it that way, the OpenUP, the AUP, how UP relates to the IBM Practices, and other topics.

Hope you find it interesting. As I've written in the past, the RUP can be as agile as you want to make it. Furthermore, there are a lot of really good ideas in the RUP that the agile community can and should choose to mine, although sadly I see far too many teams doing things the hard way and reinventing the process wheel on their own. I hope they're enjoying themselves, because it clearly isn't a very efficient way for them to go about process improvement.